Evaluation of an Experimental-Numerical Workflow for Analysis of Shear Zone Development in Clean Sands
Publication: Geo-Congress 2023
ABSTRACT
The importance of shear rupture in large-scale deformations of granular materials makes it a popular subject of many physical experiments supplemented by numerical analyses. Quite often the experiments provide the physical results on which numerical analyses rely for verification and validation. This workflow may not be reliable in applications centered around understanding the kinematics of individual grains within a developing shear zone, because the grains that are visible behind a transparent plexiglass boundary are simultaneously influenced by the presence of the boundary. This study critically evaluates this experimental-numerical workflow by quantifying the kinematics of grains adjacent to and away from the boundaries in simulations made directly analogous to their experimental counterpart. Base-offset experiments with a clean sand are performed multiple times to assess their average results and repeatability of results, and the results of numerical simulations are evaluated based on their similarity to the averaged experimental results. The level set discrete element method is utilized to capture the precise three-dimensional grain morphologies present in the experiments, and the sample preparation procedure of the experiments is replicated numerically. The development of the shear is analyzed in full quantitative detail in terms of grain displacements and rotations, and the transmission of forces throughout the experiment is deduced via grain-to-grain contact forces in the analogous simulations.
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Geo-Congress 2023
Pages: 115 - 123
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Published online: Mar 23, 2023
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